'The Lucky One,' 2 stars

In "The Lucky One," an occasionally shirtless Zac Efron lifts heavy things, plays the piano, reads "Moby Dick," bonds with a small child and fixes a tractor. Puppies lick his face.

'The Lucky One'

Bad:

Director: Scott Hicks.

Cast: Zac Efron, Taylor Schilling, Blythe Danner, Jay R. Ferguson.

Rating: PG-13 for some sexuality and violence.

If that got your pulse racing, or if you've bought a Tiger Beat magazine for yourself in the past year, go see "The Lucky One," the latest in a long line of treacly romances adapted from a Nicholas Sparks novel. If you've seen any of them before -- such as "Dear John," "The Last Song" or the original gold standard, "The Notebook" -- then you know what to expect: pretty people and schmaltz.

Efron stars as Logan, a Marine who narrowly avoids death when he ducks out of the line of fire to pick up a photograph of a beautiful blond woman left lying in the rubble. Logan credits the woman in the photo for saving his life. When he returns to the States, he sets out to find his guardian angel.

It's not a long search. By the end of the opening credit sequence, he's found Beth (Taylor Schilling), a willowy single mother who operates a family-run dog kennel from her home. Instead of telling her about the photo and how it saved his life, Logan ends up taking a job at the kennel.

The hunky Marine quickly wins over Beth's son (a chess-playing violinist plucked from the Unrealistically Precocious Cutie-pie Casting Office) and her grandmother (played by the always-charming Blythe Danner). It's not long before Beth finds herself drooling over Logan as he carries around big bags of dog food in tight shirts. Romance (or at least lust disguised as romance) is in the air.

The problem? Beth's jealous ex-husband, Keith (Jay R. Ferguson), is none too pleased to find a young guy with the body of an underwear model wooing his ex, so he sets about sabotaging the budding romance.

Keith's the bad guy, by the way. And just to make double sure you root for Logan, the movie lays on the menace with a trowel. A power-mad cop in a small Southern town with a judge for a daddy, the constantly scowling, muscle-car-driving Keith pushes Beth around, threatens Logan and calls his son a sissy. If Beth pursues Logan, he warns, he'll take custody of their son.

The only way he could be any more villainous is if he had a sinister mustache to twirl.

Efron is a bona fide leading man now, and he ably carries the weight of the romance on his sculpted shoulders. Unfortunately, it's not much to carry. The bags of dog food have more heft than this plodding, paint-by-the-numbers romance, and Efron isn't given much to do beyond look good in boxer briefs. All the soaking-wet outdoor-shower-sex scenes in the world can't make up for the lack of chemistry.

"The Lucky One" is cinematic junk food. It's "Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Movie," where every landscape shot has the warm glow of a Thomas Kinkade painting. It plays lip service to the role of fate in our lives, occasionally waxing philosophical about destiny to pave over the script's more outrageous plot points. But it's all just empty calories and little more than an excuse to watch Zac Efron play with puppies. It's nice, but for anyone who's too mature for Tiger Beat, it's not enough.

Reach the reporter at barbara.vandenburgh@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-8371.